The sun was beating down on the neighborhood kids. One by one, they jumped in the pool, escaping its harsh rays—ignorant to the wind picking up around them. They noticed, they just cared more for their makeshift diving board and trying to create whirlpools. No threat of a storm could mellow this fun.

That is, until a baby sister ran outside buck-naked. She began crying about swirling leaves, the wind blowing in circles. “We have to go to the storm shelter!” she whined.

But these were Midwest kids, trailer kids. This was their first day sharing their new pool. And the wind wasn’t THAT bad, the kids told the baby sister as much.

Their reassurance didn’t stop her from running down the street. Quickly, her siblings and their friends wrapped towels around themselves and took after her. As they were rounding the culdasac’s edge, their stepfather’s truck pulled up.

Their stepfather yelled out his window, “Why the hell aren’t you at the shelter?! There’s a tornado a mile away!!”

In his truck their eyes widened at the sight of the baby sister sitting safely on the leather front seat. The neighborhood kids piled onto the truck-bed, to be bumped half-a-mile down to the shelter.

Their mother was already there, sitting in the mildew stanked underground. “Where have you kids been?” she questioned as she pulled each kid in for a hug. “Where is your sister?”

Their stepfather snuck down the stairs and sat next to their mother, handing over their naked baby sister. “Why is she naked?” their mother asked.

“We were swimming,” the older brother says.

Their mother takes in their dripping suits, hair tied in strings, shivering in towels, barefoot on the dirt caked cement. Of course they’d been swimming, it was a hundred-degree summer day before the sky turned green.